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Sisyphus

Sisyphus, according to Homer, was king and founder of Corinth, or Ephyra as it was called in those times, who scorned the gods driven by passionate desire to outwit them. His crowning deception of the gods came close to his death, when Thanatos personally came to claim him for the underworld. Sisyphus pretened to be intrigued by the handcufs which Thanatos posssed, convincing the sprit to show him how they worked; Thanatos did so on himself. Thus Sisyphus had captured the spirt of death keeping him chained within his house for days, because of this the order of things was severely out of whack, soldiers could be hacked to bits but be back in camp for dinner. Hades, unimpressed with an empire that didn't expand, sent the god of war to free Thanatos and sent Sisyphus to the underworld for eternity. But the cunning Sisyphus had another trick up his sleeve. He conviced his wife to throw his body into a public square, thus he complained to Persephone that he hand't been given proper funeral rights and no coin with which to pay Charon and cross the river Styx. Persephone granted him leave of the underworld. But upon being delievered from the eternal darkness into the light Sisyphus was overwhelbed with the beuty and pleasure of the world, he revolted against the gods by denying death and the aphorism of the natural order, death consummates life. He remained in the light for quite some time but even he could not fight off the inevitable and was cast down into the underworld where his indiscretions caught up with him. Sisyphus was then sentanced to eternal labour and meaningless labour at that, accumulating into nothing. The task, according to some versions of the myth, was pushing a rock up a mountain only to have it fall back down upon reaching the apex; he then would descend down the moutain to start his toil again. Camus sees the myth of Sisyphus as an allegory for the human condition, Sisyphus and "his passion for life won him that unspeakable penalty in which the whole being is exerted towards accomplishing nothing. This is the price that must be paid for the passions of this earth". According to Camus what is tragic and Heroic about Sisyphus is his conciousness of the absurdity of his existance and instread of commiting sucide he asserts his liberty and passion in the act of revolt. He gives the absurdity a subjective meaning by affirming his passion in his rebellion and thus "he is superior to his fate. He is stronger than his rock".

During a lecture before the Eugenics Society in 1937, British economist John Maynard Keynes stated that “a greater cumulative increment than 1 per cent per annum in the standard of life has seldom proved practicable”. Moreover, Keynes continued, “generally speaking the rate of improvement seems to have been somewhat less then 1 per cent per annum cumulative”. Of course, Keynes was speaking during the great depression, and therefore his remarks may be tainted with a particular pessimism. But they draw into sharp relief the experience of economic growth in post-war Japan: between 1950 and 1973, GDP growth averaged 10%, a rate of sustained growth never before seen .By 1962, the English publication Economist, with poetic flair, dubbed Japan’s recovery an “economic miracle” . This designation caught on and became a general catch phrase for spectacular economic growth. In the case of Japan, a multitude of explanations have arisen for why Japan underwent an ‘economic miracle’. Crucial to el…

Western Marxism has often laid considerable stress upon the ideology of modern capitalist societies. This focus upon ideology stems from the failure of proletarian revolution to have either occurred, or establish socialism within Western Europe. The exact nature and function of ideology became paramount in Marxian explanations of the continued stability of Western capitalism after the Great War and Great Depression. Marxian conceptualizations of symbolic domination (under the notion of ideology) remain in the realm of consciousness and intellectual frameworks. Pierre Bourdieu developed a paradigm for understanding symbolic power and domination through his theory of dispositional practices that breaks with the concept of ideology and it basis in the tradition of ‘Kantian intellectualism’. This theoretical model both deepens and broadens the sociological understanding of symbolic power and domination, through the acknowledgment of non-intellectual and bodily elements in the dynamics of…